House, 1986. Print.

Qiu, Xiaolong. Four Quartets. Guiing: Lijiang Press, 1985. Print.

Russo, John Paul. I. A. Richards: His Life and Work. Baltimore: The Johns

Hopkins UP, 1989. Print.

Stem, Bert. Winter in China: An American Lijè. Trans. Ma XiaoWu and Yu

Wanhui. Beijing: Peking UP, 2016. Print.

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Education Press, 1996. Print.

Sun, Yushi. The History of Chinese Modernist Poetry. Beijing: Peking UP, 1993.

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Wang, Chih-Ming. “Geopolitics of Literature.” Cultural Studies 25. 6 (July 2012):

740-64. Print.

Wang, Enzhong. A Chinese Selection of Eliot’s Poetic Theories. Beijing:

International Culture Publishing Company, 1989. Print.

Xia, Ji’an. Selected Writings of Xia Ji’an. Shenyang: Liaoning Education Press,

2001. Print.

Yuan, Kejia. “Introducing The Nine Leaves Anthology.” Chinese Literature

(April 1982): 86-97. Print.

Zha, Liangzheng. British Modernist Poems. Changsha: Hunan People’s

Publishing House, 1985. Print.

Zhang, Jian. T. S. Eliot: A Reading of His Poems and Plays. Beijing: Foreign

Language Teaching and Research P. 2006. Print.

T. S. Eliot and English Romantic Tradition. Beijing: Foreign Language

Teaching and Research P, 1996. Print.

Zhao, Luorui. My L~ft. Beijing: Peking UP, 1996. Print.

Zhao, Yiheng. American Modernist Poems. Beijing: Foreign Literature Press,

1985. Print.

Three Laughs of Peas. Shanghai: Shanghai Education Press, 1998. Print.

Zhou, Jueliang. “On Mu Dan’s Poetry and Translated Poems.” A Nation Has

Arisen: A Memoir of Mu Dan as Poet and Translator. Ed. Du Yunxie. Nanjing:

Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, 1987. Print.

“Mr. Eliot has Re-Discovered a Portrait of Himself”: ReframingLewis’s Rejected Masterpiece in the 21st Century

by Jaron Murphy

Posterity would, indeed, take an interest in T.S. Eliot and hascontinued to know him, in a sense, by Wyndham Lewis’ssingular portrait (in)famously rejected by the Royal Academy in1938. In a supportive letter to Lewis dated 21 April of that year,Eliot expressly approved both the portrait and its possible role inshaping his legacy: “1 learn from the Telegraph that your portraitof me has been rejected by the Academy... But so far as the sitteris able to judge, it seems to me a very good portrait, and one bywhich I am quite willing that posterity should know me, if ittakes any interest in me at all.” Considerable, enduring interestis evidenced in significant part, of course, by the very existence(since 2006) of the T.S. Eliot Society of the United Kingdom; andnaturally, by way of a news item dated July 2017 on its website,the society drew attention to the appearance of the rejectedportrait as part of the major retrospective Wyndham Lewis: Li~fe,Art, War at the Imperial War Museums North in Manchester,which closed on 1 January 2018. The portrait constitutes, after all,arguably the iconic image of Eliot internationally, havingfeatured in various art exhibitions in the UK and abroad, and —with much greater circulation, traction, and longevity — withinand on the front covers of informative and influential books onLewis and Eliot since the mid~20tt~ century.

However, the well-intended, brief news item (which is stillaccessible on the website) alerting readers to the portrait being“currently on display” provides little in terms of evaluating and

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illuminating its significance in relation to, specifically, Eliot. Aswe shall see, this is symptomatic of wider scholarly patchinessand, at times, sheer neglect in this regard — oddly, given not onlythe rather obvious and fundamental visual link between portraitand sitter but also the portrait’s increased international renownand recognisability through high-profile art exhibitions and bookreproductions. It is this curious phenomenon of a scarcity ofscholarly attention to the relation between the portrait and, inparticular, Eliot (rather than predominantly Lewis as artist)which this essay seeks to begin to address, not least in calling forincreased acknowledgement and appreciation of Eliot’s personalencounter with the portrait in the city of Durban in apartheidSouth Africa in 1954; and in urging, in this vein, a ‘postcolonial’reframing, with the benefit of 21sl~century hindsight, of theportrait’s highly charged historical importance to Eliot’s legacy,too, beyond merely the rejection controversy of 1938.

The news item, nevertheless, helpfully contains an imageof the portrait; a link to a newsreel clip (also accessible via theResources tab on the website) of Lewis answering a journalist’squestions following the Academy’s rejection of the portrait, nextto which he is standing; and a link to the exhibition floor mapand audio guide (no longer available on the Imperial WarMuseums website post-exhibition), which understandablyfocused on Lewis, primarily, in placing the portrait in itshistorical context:

Several of Lewis’s sitters from this period [late 1930s] werewriter friends, including the poets Ezra Pound and StephenSpender, and the novelist Naomi Mitchison. However, hisfinest portrait was of his close friend T.S. Eliot. The portraittoday is acknowledged as one of the greatest of the 2Ot1~ century.

It shows the aesthetic, be-suited Eliot formally, rather stifflyposed, yet his gaze is drifted left as if distracted by privatethoughts. These are suggested in the scrolling abstract formssituated either side of the poet.

Despite its virtuosity it was Lewis’s most controversialpainting, owing to its rejection by the Royal Academy in 1938.Lewis’s submission of the portrait was a surprise in itself. He hadalways disdained the institution, considering it hackneyed andcommercially driven. Nevertheless, he described the portraitsubmission as a test case, a move perhaps intended to test theartistic climate of 1930s Britain. So when the portrait was dulyrejected Lewis’s worst suspicions were confirmed. The rejection,however, caused a press furore, stoked by Lewis’s friendAugustus John’s protest resignation from the Royal Academy.Even Winston Churchill weighed in, in support of the Academy,stating: “The function of the Royal Academy is to hold a middlecourse between tradition and innovation. It is not the functionof the Royal Academy to run wildly after novelty.”

The controversy gave Lewis a brief period in the limelight,restoring his reputation as an artistic rebel. However, theportrait’s subsequent rejection by the Tate Gallery undoubtedlywas a factor in Lewis’s decision to depart Britain for his nativeCanada in 1939. 2

Helpfully, too, the news item contains a link to an article —or rather, as it turns out, a series of snippets — by Skye Sherwinon the Guardian website (which is also still accessible), under thebanner “Arts: Anatomy of an Artwork” and with the headline“Wyndham Lewis’s TS Eliot: a jigsaw puzzle of rebellion andradicalism”. ~ The page features a portion of the portrait (a closeup of Eliot’s head and upper body, with background imagery)

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beneath the sub-headline: “History remembers the artist as aHitler sympathiser, but his guiding principle — as illustrated bythis portrait, which the RA rejected — was a passion to agitate”. Afull image of the portrait appears below four brief sections of textand a closing line indicating the portrait’s inclusion in theexhibition.

The first section, with the heading “Great Planes”, offersan intriguing response to Lewis’s portrayal of Eliot, chiming withthe concept of a “jigsaw puzzle of rebellion and radicalism”introduced in the headline. Noting that “Modernist poetry’slanky luminary TS Eliot looks serious and far from comfortablein Wyndham Lewis’s famed portrait”, Sherwin adds: “His face isa jigsaw puzzle of shadowy half-moons and sharp planes. Thehands droop from the oversized suit, suggesting the subtlecreepiness of a limp handshake.” Sherwin does not elaborate butthis interpretative slice raises, tantalizingly, the question ofwhether Lewis possibly embedded, unbeknown to Eliot, anegative slant on Eliot within the image, particularly when webear in mind Lewis’s view on another giant of 2Oth~centuryliterature, expressed in “W.B. Yeats” (1939), that the Irish poet“comes back to us as a memory of a limp hand. Or perhaps Ishould say, he does to me”, and that “the limp-hand effect”largely typified Yeats.”

The second section, with the heading “Where there’ssmoke”, clarifies which aspects the Royal Academy apparentlydisapproved of: “It was not the vaguely skin-crawling, anxiousqualities that the Royal Academy objected to when it notoriouslyrejected this portrait from its annual show in 1938. It was theabstract bits in the background, pluming menacingly like thebomb smoke of experimental ideas.” The third section, with the

heading “Rebel Yell”, underlines Lewis’s deliberatelyprovocative stance as a “self-proclaimed rebel” who “knew thepainting would be rejected”: “Before the first world war, hisvorticist movement marked him as the premier radical artist.After the war, he failed to become the British Picasso, a fact heblamed on the culture at large.” The final section, with theheading “Despicable Me”, aims at encapsulating what Lewis wasultimately all about: “History remembers Lewis as a woman-hating Hitler sympathiser,” Sherwin writes, but Lewis’s “politicsare inconsistent. His book, The Jews: Are They Human? forinstance, was a satire against antisemites”. Sherwin concludes:“What ties it all together is a contrarian passion to agitate.”

Strangely, however, acknowledgement and appreciationof Eliot’s rather conspicuous and important contribution asLewis’s sitter — effectively lending himself, as it were, as alongtime friend and ally to both the artist’s a) creative endeavorin the first instance, and b) licence in agitating against theperceived orthodoxy of the Royal Academy — remain perhapsimplicit, rather than explicit, across the news item and Sherwin’ssnippets, which was the case, too, with the exhibitioninformation. Eliot’s letter to Lewis on 21 April 1938 makes clearhis “feeling of relief” at the rejection, and affirms his position insolidarity with Lewis: “Had the portrait been accepted, I shouldhave been pleased — that a portrait by you should have beenaccepted by the Academy would have been a good augury... ButI am glad to think that a portrait of myself should not appear inthe exhibition of the Royal Academy, and I certainly have nodesire, now, that my portrait should be painted by any painterwhose portrait of me would be accepted by the Royal Academy.”

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Further written evidence of Eliot’s support could beadduced. In Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (2000), PaulEdwards explains that the “process of analysis by which Eliot’shead was schematised can be seen in a sketch inscribed by Lewis‘Rough note for Eliot painting in Durban 1938”. In a brief writeup about this charcoal-on-paper sketch, in Wyndham LewisPortraits (2008), Edwards notes that Eliot himself signed it andspeculates he did so “perhaps as a sign of his alliance with Lewisin the public controversy that attended the finished portrait”. 6Unsurprisingly, a close-up of Eliot derived from the portraitappears on the cover of Wyndham Lewis Portraits; and the portraitis reproduced in full on p69, opposite a write-up on p68 whichalso insightfully, but all too briefly, relates the representation ofEliot in the artwork to the actual flesh-and-blood Eliot:

This is Lewis’s most famous portrait — rejected by theRoyal Academy in 1938. The Academy claimed to object tothe elaborate ‘scrolls’ in the background, which of coursehad symbolic significance... In his smart suit, Eliot sitsslightly hunched, avoiding our gaze. We are left to judgewhether his respectability has been at the cost of turninghis back on the sources of his creativity or whether theyare still active in him. His haunted expression seems tochime with Eliot’s own later belief that he had paid toohigh a price in personal happiness for being a poet.

Moreover, it is especially peculiar that Eliot’s personal encounterwith the portrait at the Durban Municipal Art Gallery, SouthAfrica, in 1954, where Lewis’s masterpiece had been rehomedpost-rejection, in 1939, is not registered across the news item andSherwin’s account, and was not, too, in the exhibition

information — as has been the case with various past exhibitionsand accompanying publications featuring the portrait, in the UK(including the National Portrait Gallery exhibition in London andcompanion publication Wyndham Lewis Portraits in 2008) andelsewhere. While the collected letters of Eliot is a multi-volumework in painstaking progress and will hopefully yield furtherrelevant details in due course, reference might have been made,at least, to this remarkable occasion, captured in the standaloneblack-and-white photo of Eliot “pointing to the 1938 portrait ofhimself” which has long since appeared in The Letters of WyndhamLewis (1963), opposite p253, in between Lewis’s salvoesconcerning the rejection to the editors of the Daily Telegraph(dated 24 April 1938) and The Times (1 May 1938) respectively. Asthe caption also states: “(Photograph taken in Durban in 1954)”;while the book’s list of Illustrations, on pxv, adds the source: “Bycourtesy of the Natal Mercury”, a local Durban newspaper. Likevarious other exhibitions and publications, the bookaccompanying the recent Manchester exhibition, also entitledWyndham Lewis!:] Life, Art, War (2017) and produced by RichardSlocombe (with a preface by Edwards), duly acknowledges theDurban Art Gallery as the portrait’s custodian (above a shortwrite-up, on p74, opposite a full-page reproduction of themasterpiece) but does not mention Eliot’s encounter with theeponymous portrait at the gallery in 1954. ~ do various newsarticles reviewing the exhibition, as might then be expected. Yetnor, too, is there reference to the encounter in the actualcorrespondence contained in the Letters.

Without any available written record by Eliot and Lewisregarding the encounter, then, it is difficult to discern Eliot’sthoughts upon becoming reacquainted with the portrait, or whatLewis would have made of it. Nevertheless, the absence of any

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mention of the encounter in their correspondence contained inthe Letters is also remarkable, especially as the photograph of theencounter is incorporated into the book. Significantly, too, thephotograph in the book, published in 1963, forms part, in fact, ofan earlier historical record — with the same (or possibly an almostidentical) photo having appeared, as we shall see shortly, in TheNatal Mercury in 1954, not as a standalone image such as that inthe book but as the focal point of a far more illuminating newsarticle on Eliot’s re-discovery of the portrait. The photographthus preserves for posterity a seemingly benign instance of Eliotas smiling public man, in direct relation to the artwork, in theDurban gallery in 1954. In Wyndham Lewis: Paintings andDrawings (1971), Walter Michel briefly draws attention to theexistence of the image: “A 1954 photograph (reproduced inLetters) shows T.S. Eliot animatedly inspecting his portrait atDurban... When that portrait was rejected by the hangingcommittee of the 1938 Royal Academy exhibition, he had saidthat he would be quite willing to be known to posterity throughit; he had reason to be pleased, for Lewis had made a profoundpainting.” 8 by Eliot’s facial expression and overall bodylanguage, he evidently remained pleased with the ‘recognized’masterpiece at the Durban gallery, and took pleasure in theoccasion, in 1954. Notably, however, while there is a perhaps(un)intended kind of symmetry between the shadows around theheads of each Eliot, the juxtaposition is also striking in that the65-year-old Eliot appears to be in good spirits while the“haunted” younger Eliot is clearly not. ~ Beyond the patentpositivity of the elderly Eliot’s gesture, it is difficult to gauge anylevels of poignancy and nostalgia as he comes face to face, as itwere, with his younger self at the centre of the controversialartwork. Nor is it clear whether his gesture was, as an honoured

and obliging guest of the city, at the behest of the photographer’slikely ‘staged’ direction or a spontaneous “animated” response tothe portrait.

Whatever we might deduce from the photograph, Eliot’spersonal encounter with the portrait in Durban in 1954 has,inherently, a biographical significance that merits due attention,rather than a line or two in passing and general neglect, in thecritical field. Curiously, the lacuna concerning the encounter also— indeed, especially — afflicts Eliot scholarship. Perhaps the moststriking example is Peter Ackroyd’s biography T.S. Eliot (1984),the front cover of which is so arresting owing to theincorporation of a portion of the portrait (a cropped close-up ofEliot) into the design. As the sleeve duly acknowledges: “Thejacket design by Mon Mohan is based on the painting of T.S. Eliotby Wyndham Lewis. Reproduced by kind permission of theDurban Museum and Art Gallery, South Africa.” ‘°However, therejection controversy and subsequent rehoming of the portrait inDurban do not get a mention in chapter 12, entitled “Out of theStorm 1935-1939”, and later attention to Eliot’s holidays with theFabers to South Africa in the 1950s. Near the end of chapter 14,entitled “The Rigours of Life 1946-1949”, Ackroyd explains that“for once he [Eliot] had planned to escape the worst excesses ofthe English winter, and at the beginning of 1950 he embarkedwith the Fabers on a six-week cruise to South Africa: two weeksgetting there, two weeks on the beach at St James near CapeTown, and two weeks back”. 11 Commencing chapter 15, entitled“The Public Man 1950-1956”, Ackroyd reports that Eliot “hadarrived in South Africa by the time The Cocktail Party opened inNew York on 21 January 1950, at the Henry Miller Theatre”.Outlining Eliot’s growing celebrity status internationally, he addsthat when Eliot “arrived in South Africa, a crowd was waiting at

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the dock to greet him” — a fact “[r]eported to the present authorby A.L. Rowse”, Ackroyd clarifies in a note — and “on later visitsto the United States he was besieged by autograph hunters andpress photographers waiting for him after readings”.~12

It is well known that Ackroyd laboured under severeconstraints. As he writes candidly in the “Acknowledgments”: “Iwas forbidden by the Eliot estate to quote from Eliot’s publishedwork, except for purposes of fair comment in a critical context, orto quote from Eliot’s unpublished work or correspondence.” 13Yet such strictures do not account for Ackroyd’s neglect of Eliot’sencounter with the portrait — and local press — in South Africa in1954. Nevertheless, he helpfully conveys the ageing Eliot’ssusceptibility to bronchitis and places the trip to South Africa inthe context of Eliot’s health issues, all of which is relevantinformation lacking in the photo caption (and only very slightlyreferred to, by Lewis in a letter to Eliot dated 19 December 1953,on pp553-4) in the Letters:

He had been urged by his doctor to escape the English winterand at the end of the year [1953] he went once more to SouthAfrica for a ten-week holiday, sailing to Durban and thenproceeding in a leisurely fashion to Cape Town. Although thiscruise was to be in the nature of a ‘rest cure’, almost immediatelyafter his return in early March 1954, he suffered an attack oftachycardia, marked by an acceleration of the pulse. He wentinto the London Clinic for three weeks and after X-rays, bloodtests and cardiographic treatment it was discovered that thedisorder had no organic origin — its source was essentially anervous one and seemed likely to have been the result ofover-exertion and worry. 14

As this illustrates, Sherwin’s notion of a “jigsaw puzzle” could beextended to piecing together the elderly Eliot’s encounter withthe portrait at a time when he was an established internationalcelebrity — not least for having won the Nobel Prize for Literaturein 1948 — and therefore of continuing interest to the public andpress within his own lifetime, as well as to posterity. That said,Ackroyd’s book is symptomatic of how, in Eliot scholarship, theencounter can be simply, like the elusive Macavity, not there. Amore recent example, and puzzling in its own way, is LyndallGordon’s revised biography, entitled The Imperfect Life of T.S. Eliot(2012). Gordon refers to the portrait almost immediately, on p1,where she offers a layered perspective on Lewis’s representationof Eliot, in terms of a distinction between the outer surface andinner substance:

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 inSt Louis, Missouri, the son of a New England schoolteacherand a St Louis merchant. Thirty-eight years later he wasbaptised as an Anglican in an English village. Such facts telllittle of a man for whom there was usually a gap between hisoutward and his private life, the constructed, highly articulatesurface and the inward ferment. Wyndham Lewis painted Eliot’sface as if it were a mask, so that he might distinguish Eliot’sformal surface from his hooded introspective eyes, and thesevere dark lines of his suit from the flesh of his shouldersbeneath. Virginia Woolf wrote that his hazel eyes seemed oddlylively and youthful in a pale, sculptured, even heavy face.Eliot’s admirers played up his mask, while detractors stripped itonly to find the flaws: both overlooked a man of extremes whosevirtues and flaws were interfused. 15

In chapter 6, entitled “Conversion”, Gordon refers again toLewis’s portrait in highlighting “another picture of Eliot’sdetachment in a sketch by Vivienne called ‘Fête Galante”:

At a bohemian party, a lively girl called Sybilla encounters anAmerican financier-poet. She describes him leaning withexaggerated grace against the fireplace, refusing to speak. Herportrait is rather like the one painted by Wyndham Lewis of Eliota few years later — a heavy, slumbering, white face; long hoodedeyes, unseeing and leaden-heavy; a large sleek head. 16

Oddly, however, despite Gordon’s recourse to Lewis’sportrait as a point of reference in seeking, ultimately, to bring an“interfused” Eliot to the fore, she also does not touch upon therejection controversy, subsequent rehoming of the portrait inDurban, and Eliot’s personal encounter with the portrait there in1954. That the encounter took place in her country of origin(although in Durban rather than her birth city of Cape Town)makes the neglect all the more perplexing. Nevertheless,Gordon’s layered perspective is certainly compelling andintersects, notably, with the notion of a “mask” in the brief writeup on the portrait in the Manchester exhibition book. Describingthe artwork as “psychologically charged”, the writer explainsthat “the scrolling abstract forms situated either side” of Eliot“serve also to undermine his mask of inscrutability”. Reconcilingmask and man must inevitably, it would seem, involve takingcognizance of the relation between the portrait and Eliot.

I have located and provide, therefore — with the kindpermission of the Bessie Head Library in Pietermaritzburg,KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa — a reproduction in full of an articlepublished on p9 of the Wednesday, 27 January 1954 edition ofThe Natal Mercury, covering the occasion when Eliot viewed the

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portrait in Durban during the first week of his holiday in SouthAfrica. 17 It features, as a natural focal point reinforced by the‘eyebrow’-type headline ‘Poet With Early Portrait’ and caption, aphoto of Eliot pointing to the portrait which appears to havebeen subsequently supplied for standalone publication in theLetters. The main headline (or heading) ‘Controversial EliotPortrait in Durban’ is rather less newsworthy given that theportrait had been in Durban since December 1939; but the intronevertheless accentuates Eliot’s renown and the controversialhistory of the painting: “The work of Mr. T.S. Eliot, world-famous poet and playwright now in Durban, has stirred upcontroversy in many countries. But in the Durban Municipal ArtGallery Mr. Eliot has re-discovered a portrait of himself which in1938 stirred up more controversy than any of his works.”

The article duly sketches the rejection fallout, includinghow the portrait “set the whole art world in furore, [and] wasfeatured on the front pages of every British newspaper”;Augustus John’s protest resignation from the Royal Academy;and the longstanding association between the “as famous” Lewisand Eliot. Beneath the crosshead ‘EAGER BUYER’ there arequotes from a former director of the Durban gallery, E. C. Chubb,on the Tate being a potentially willing purchaser of the portrait,but perhaps the most illuminating supplementary information inthe article concerns how the rejected portrait was acquired by theDurban municipality. The article discloses that the portrait “wasgiven to the Art Gallery anonymously, but is understood to havebeen procured by a Dr. May, in 1939 chairman of the Art GalleryAdvisory Committee, through Dr. T. J. Honeyman, nowchairman of Glasgow’s Vasco Art Gallery, and formerly partherin the West End firm of Reid and Lefebre [sic] art dealers. It issaid to have been bought from the artist himself and, though the

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purchase price is unknown, it is thought that this was in theregion of £200.” Readers of The Natal Mercury were thereforequite sufficiently in the picture, so to speak, on the portrait’shistory and significance, including the new development ofEliot’s personal encounter with it, long before Honeyman’srecollection of the portrait’s sale to Durban appeared in Art andAudacity (1971), where Lewis rather than Eliot is understandablyin focus. 18

In fact, in light of Ackroyd’s extraordinarily thin accountof Eliot’s trip, it is worth highlighting that Eliot’s fame meant hisarrival in Durban had already been made known to thenewspaper’s readers prior to the article on his re-discovery of theportrait at the municipal gallery. I have also located and provide— with the kind permission of the Bessie Head Library — areproduction in full of an article published on p9 of the Saturday,23 January 1954 edition of The Natal Mercury, which features aheadshot of Eliot above the headline “S.A. May Inspire Eliot ToNew Prose Works”. The ship Eliot arrived on is named in theintro, as are his travelling companions in the final sentence:“SOUTH AFRICA may well prove the inspiration for the nextwork of Mr. T.S. Eliot, poet and playwright, and a Nobel prizewinner, who arrived in Durban yesterday aboard the RhodesiaCastle... With him to Durban travelled Mr. Geoffrey Faber, thepublisher, and Mrs. Faber.” I have, furthermore, located andprovide — with the kind permission of the Bessie Head Library —a photo which appeared in a society news section of theWednesday, 27 January 1954 edition, of the Fabers and Kellysenjoying drinks, sans mention of Eliot and/or a cross-reference tothe article on his re-discovery of the portrait. The caption reads:“SIR GEOFFREY AND LADY FABER (right), who are at presentin Durban during a visit to South Africa from England, last night

held a cocktail party in the Butterworth Hotel’s Magnolia Room.They were photographed with two of their guests, Mr. and Mrs.C.A. Kelly, of London, who are touring the Union.” (illustration1) Evidently taking the titled Fabers’ fame for granted, thecaption adds: “Mr. Kelly is a director of Gordon and Gotch,London, and of the Central News Agency.” News of where Eliotwas headed, and when, must have spread quickly. The Saturdayarticle also reveals: “After spending a week in Durban, Mr. Eliotwill travel via the Garden Route to the Cape, from where he willsail for England on February 25.”

After reading the article there can be little surprise that, asAckroyd says, Eliot fell ill “almost immediately after his return”to England. The article sheds light on the 65-year-old Eliotholidaying in South Africa to improve his health but being, inreality, unlikely to be able to switch off from his work andassociated anxieties. As we have seen, Ackroyd reports in regardto the first trip that Eliot “had arrived in South Africa by the timeThe Cocktail Party opened in New York on 21 January 1950”.Similarly, in 1954, it is reported in the article that during his stayin South Africa “Mr. Eliot will be waiting anxiously for the NewYork verdict on his new verse play ‘The Confidential Clerk,’which opens there next month. He expects a cable on the openingnight.” Eliot was also evidently pressed, perhaps awkwardly, forword of a local production: “The Confidential Clerk’ is expectedto be brought to South Africa as soon as production difficultieswill allow.”

Moreover, quotation of Eliot by a Natal Mercury reporteralso appears quite contradictory in regard to his work. Eliotinitially claims that “I am doing no work at all on this trip, whichis in the nature of a health cruise, and am making as few plans as

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possible for the future.” Yet in the next sentence it is clear thatwork is still very much on his mind: “But my next work will bedifferent. I want to turn to something new — prose, probablyessays.” Eliot gives the impression that, wherever he might be, heliterally lives and breathes his work, such that it is “veryprobable that South Africa will give me the inspiration for them”.Retreating into a somewhat Paterian sensibility, he adds: “But Iam not consciously seeking that inspiration. I find it better toabsorb impressions as they are made on me and let them taketheir effect as they will.”

Tracing any possible influence(s) on Eliot’s works in laterlife arising from his holiday(s) to South Africa is beyond thescope of this essay, which seeks rather to convey that, in all,Eliot’s ‘health holiday’ in South Africa and encounter with theportrait in Durban in 1954, especially, merit improved scholarlyand, by extension, public attention and appreciation, by way offuture exhibitions and books (not least biographies) on Eliot andLewis. To adapt lines from “Burnt Norton” (1935), theremarkable encounter raises questions of the relationshipbetween “Time present and time past” and how both are“perhaps present in time future/And time future contained intime past”. 19 For instance, had the relation between Eliot and theportrait markedly changed by 1954 compared to 1938 — and if so,in what way(s)? To what extent is Eliot’s, rather than solelyLewis’s, legacy intertwined with the portrait, as a lasting anddominant image of him (among many other images) exhibitedand published internationally, not least on the front covers ofbooks? To what extent has the portrait’s cultural as well asmonetary value derived from the stature of its subject, ratherthan solely of the agitator-artist and quality of the artwork, overtime? As might be expected, the portrait is now worth a

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considerable sum. According to a Durban Art Gallery PermanentCollection Catalogue document, the artwork was revalued at R6402 440 in 2002 — a fortune in South Africa but a less impressiveamount when converted into British pounds. However, gallerystaff believe the portrait would fetch substantially more were itever to be put up for sale. Unfortunately, the catalogue documentis not supplemented by any written record of the rationalejustifying the revaluation figure, which would perhaps haveoffered fascinating insights into the estimation of Lewis, Eliot,and their legacies.

The encounter also raises questions of how Eliot himselfmight have evaluated and interpreted (aspects of) the portrait, inline or not with Lewis’s imaginative vision and possible or evenlikely symbolical meaning(s), bearing in mind such thought-provoking responses as Sherwin’s and Gordon’s, and,predominantly in the field of Lewis scholarship, those ofEdwards. That Eliot admired the portrait and endorsed its role inhis legacy is backed by the photographic and textual evidence,including what Paul O’Keeffe, in Some Sort of Genius: A Life ofWyndham Lewis (2000), describes as Eliot’s “hearty testimonial inthe pages of Time magazine”, which is reminiscent of his letter toLewis dated 21 April 1938: “I shall not turn in my grave if, after Iam settled in the cemetery this portrait is the image that willcome into people’s minds when my name is mentioned. It seemsto me also a good picture, as well as a good portrait; and if itwere the portrait not of myself, but of someone whose features Icould contemplate with more tenderness, I think I could live withit.” 20 However, given the long and complex nature of therelationship between Lewis and Eliot, should we not also ventureto question whether Eliot’s approbation was as wholehearted asit might seem, as well as factor in the sensitivities referred to by

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Jeffrey Meyers in “Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot: A Friendship”(1980)? Meyers writes that Eliot “greatly admired this portrait,which captured the essence of his mind and art, and told Lewishe was quite willing for posterity to know him by that image (aphotograph of 1954, reproduced in Lewis’ Letters, shows Eliotpointing to the portrait with smiling admiration)”. Yet is a germof doubt detectable, for instance, in Eliot’s qualification in theletter dated 21 April 1938: “And though I may not be the bestjudge of it as portraiture, I am sure that it is a very finepainting”? Are “seems” and “quite” in the letter also perhapstelling subtleties, when he affirms that it “seems to me a verygood portrait, and one by which I am quite willing that posterityshould know me”? The Time testimonial quoted above alsoreflects Eliot’s preference for “seems” rather than a definite “is”.While his choice of words might merely bespeak thecharacteristically “cautious and circumspect” Eliot depicted byMeyers, could a possible hint of dubiety and reticence towardsLewis have been lingering in 1954?

Meyers also explains that “Eliot’s respectability, religion,success, wealth, and fame impeded his friendship with Lewis —who had none of these acquisitions”, with Lewis in late lifehaving “continued his rivalry with Eliot”. Although the“friendship of Lewis and Eliot was based on intellectualsympathy and mutual esteem”, Meyers writes, Lewis “used hisfailure and Eliot’s success to his own moral advantage, for bothmen felt that Lewis had received much less recognition that [sicjhe deserved. Eliot, somewhat embarrassed by his own fame,freely expressed his admiration for Lewis in a dozen books andessays published between 1918 and 1960.” 21 Such factors, then,along with the portrait’s rejection perhaps also having remainedsomething of a sore point for Lewis, who was by then ailing and

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largely blind, might help us to make sense of the remarkableabsence (unless the multi-volume collected letters shed light onthe matter in due course) of correspondence between Eliot andLewis regarding the encounter and concomitant publicity despiteLewis’s reference to the trip to South Africa in the letter to Eliotdated 19 December 1953. 22 Eliot’s self-image, so to speak, inrelation to Lewis, might also be more closely considered bysetting his revealing admission of an inability to contemplate theportrait with “more tenderness” and to “live with it” alongsidethe image of him “pointing to the portrait with smilingadmiration”.

In 2018, Eliot’s holidays in South Africa and, specifically,his opportunity to view the portrait in Durban in 1954 might givescholars and the public pause for thought in terms of historicalrealities and revisionist perspectives. It is well known, forinstance, that a number of critics have, controversially, attackedEliot’s reputation in recent decades, alleging anti-semitism andmisogyny. However, a measure of ‘post-colonial’ reappraisal,along with improved acknowledgment and understanding of thetimes he lived through, might also be prompted by flagging anextremely ugly side to his rather genteel holiday(s) in SouthAfrica (not explicitly mentioned by Ackroyd) and personalencounter there with the portrait: they took place, of course, in aracially segregated society. In the context of South Africa’slongstanding colonial ties with Britain (recently reaffirmed by apost-war royal family tour, in 1947) but in particular the adventof apartheid in 1948, Eliot enjoyed, even as a tourist from abroad,a range of local privileges on account of his ‘white’ backgroundrather than merely literary celebrity status, including access topublic amenities and services (such as the Durban Municipal ArtGallery itself, prime hotel facilities, particular means of transport,

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and select beaches) which were denied to those routinelyreferred to in the pages of The Natal Mercury, and wider SouthAfrican society, as “natives” (among other negative terms).

That it was a deeply and very visibly segregated society,including prominent racist signage in public places and anoppressed ‘black’ servant underclass at beck and call, might befactored in, at least, to scholarly reflection on his holidays therewith the Fabers, to speculation that South Africa might inspirehis work and host productions of his work, and to his somewhatrefined and rarefied preference, as stated while in Durban, forabsorbing impressions as they were made on him and lettingthem take their effect as they willed. 23 It should be recognised,too, just how culturally agreeable ‘white’, largely English-speaking Durban of the mid~2Oth1 century was as a new home forthe rejected portrait and as a holiday destination for cultivatedBritish travellers such as the Fabers and Eliot. As the pages of TheNatal Mercury show, the paper and its readership in the coastal,usually sunny city were indeed fundamentally and generallyracist long before the advent of apartheid yet were also by andlarge liberal. Proud of the city’s rich colonial heritage and thecountry’s support of Britain in World War Two, Durbanites wereill at ease with the prospect and establishment of Afrikaner rule.We might therefore adapt and extend Eliot’s own contention that“no art... can exist in a vacuum” to this exceedingly complexhistorical context and view the occasion of his encounter with theportrait against a much bigger picture, as a remarkable event farmore complicated in retrospect than the standalone snapshot inthe Letters, or Ackroyd’s account of the 1954 trip especially, or thephotos and articles in The Natal Mercury reproduced here, conveyto us in themselves — not to mention the myriad publications and

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exhibitions where the trip and encounter have simply not beenregistered at all. 24

In this vein, a key component of the overall purpose ofthis essay is to contend that scholarship concerning the portraithas, over many years, evidently fallen deeper and deeper into thekind of culture trap delineated by Edward Said in Culture andImperialism (1993). Said takes issue with a notion of culture that“entails not only venerating one’s own culture but also thinkingof it as somehow divorced from, because transcending, theeveryday world”; and he argues, persuasively, that critics of suchwriters as Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens and Thackeray havefrequently “relegated these writers’ ideas about colonialexpansion, inferior races, or ‘niggers’ to a very differentdepartment from that of culture, culture being the elevated areaof activity in which they ‘truly’ belong and in which they didtheir ‘really’ important work”. He adds: “Culture conceived inthis way can become a protective enclosure: check your politicsat the door before you enter it.” 25 While an appraisal of Eliot’sattitudes to colonialism and race is largely beyond the scope ofthis essay, it is expressly my objective to highlight that hisphotographed encounter with the portrait at the Durban galleryin 1954 provides a startling example of a remarkable culturalmoment seemingly divorced from the everyday apartheidrealities which in fact facilitated and literally surrounded it. Thiswas, we could say, an ‘exclusive’ in more ways than one, withthe cultural veneration intrinsic to the event underpinning whatwas clearly a public relations success for the gallery via The NatalMercury. Unfortunately, it appears the event and itscircumstances may not have inspired a written record by Eliot forposterity; while biographical accounts of Eliot’s spheres of

~\ %,

89

activity, in turn, have not been perceptibly troubled by thecomplexities of the South African situation and connection.

Moreover, for decades, the limited nature of informationon the iconic artwork at exhibitions, in accompanyingpublications, and in books has effectively and reductively placedit in a “protective enclosure” whereby, while Durban is routinelyacknowledged as the custodian, no mention is made of the Eliotencounter and its intersection with the complexities of theportrait’s history as the property of Durban, not least in relationto politics — including in the much longer term, given SouthAfrica’s transition from apartheid to a post-apartheid democracy.It is a troubling fact, for instance, that, while Durban has loanedthe portrait to exhibitions internationally, the portrait has notbeen on public display in Durban, according to gallery staff, formany years. While crowds, in the UK especially, flock toexhibitions featuring the portrait, the vast majority of Durbanitesand more broadly South Africans, from all backgrounds, are notaware of the portrait’s existence and significance, and itsownership by the city gallery. The political climate has, of course,shifted dramatically post-apartheid, with celebration of long-dead ‘pale male’ writers and artists from abroad like Eliot andLewis (among many others) hardly topping the cultural agendain forging a new national identity and promoting local talent andachievement. However, more pragmatically, security issues and,linked to this, far from ideal government funding for the arts,have been major areas of concern for gallery staff. 26

It is hoped that by urging a reframing of Lewis’smasterpiece in the 215t century, expressly in relation to Eliot, thisessay will help to spur scholars (including biographers) to payspecial heed to Said’s pointed reflection on how he “found it a

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challenge not to see culture in this way — that is, -ai’tiseptic~ali1yquarantined from its worldly affiliations — b~t a~ anextraordinarily varied field of endeavour”. The po1~ii”l~ascertainly not existed in a vacuum since the rejection contr.~~yand should not continue to be taken merely at face value, so tospeak. It is incumbent upon scholars, as this essay has sought toshow and emphasize, to begin to rise, in regard to the portrait, toSaid’s own stated ‘postcolonial’ challenge “to connect [works ofart and learning] not only with that pleasure and profit [ofacquaintance with them] but also with the imperial process ofwhich they were manifestly and unconcealedly a part”. The‘postcolonial’ extends in this case, of course, to apartheid andpost-apartheid South Africa; and the portrait and news coverageof the Eliot encounter are testament to Said’s suggestion that“rather than condemning or ignoring their participation in whatwas an unquestioning reality in their societies.., what we learnabout this hitherto ignored aspect actually and truly enhances ourreading and understanding of them”. 27 Context matters; effortsto view the portrait against the backdrop of historical andcontemporary realities and complexities are, surely, overdue.

NOTES

I W.K. Rose (ed.), The Letters of Wyndham Lewis (London: Methuen, 1963), 251.2 Transcribed from audio which was available on the Imperial War Museums

website at http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/wyndham-lewis-audiotour#entry4. [Accessed 3 August 2017. No longer available post-exhibIti~n, i.e.from 2 January 2018.1 ~“~ See https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jul/07/wyndharn-

lewis-ts-eliot-jigsaw-puzzle-rebellion-radicalism. [Accessed 3Ai~güst 20i17.]~ Paul Edwards (ed.), Creatures of Habit, Creatures of Change:~s’sá~js on Art,

Literature and Society, 1914-1956 (Santa Barbara: Black Sp~i~o’w Press, 1989),285. See also my essay “Passion and Imagination: Yeats’s ‘Fundamental

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~

Agreement’ With Lewis at Phase 9 in the Great Wheel of A Vision”, Journal ofWyndham Lewis Studies 7 (2016), 194-201.~ Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven and London:

Yale University Press, 2000), 468.6 Paul Edwards (with Richard Humphreys), Wyndham Lewis: Portraits

(London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2008), 70.~ See Richard Slocombe and Paul Edwards (Preface), Wyndham Lewis1:1 Life,Art, War (London: IWM, 2017).8 Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis: Drawings and Paintings (London: Thames and

Hudson, 1971), 132.9 photograph which appeared in The Natal Mercury appears to have been

doctored in the production process, removing the elderly Eliot’s shadowaround the head and underarm which can be seen in the Letters. That said, it isconceivable that perhaps a different, almost identical photo was supplied forpublication in the Letters.10 Peter Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), 251.11 Ibid., 298.12 Ibid., 299; 361 (note).

13~ Ibid., 10.‘~Ibid., 314.15Lyndall Gordon, The Imperfect Life of T.S. Eliot (1998; London: Virago, 2012),1.l6jbjd., 211.17 J wish to express my gratitude and appreciation to Senior Librarian

(Periodicals) Eshara Singh and her team at the Bessie Head Library for sowarmly and kindly facilitating my search for material in the newspaperarchives.18 See T. J. Honeyman, Art and Audacity (London: Collins, 1971), 91-2.1~T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (1969; London: Faber andFaber, 2004), 171.20 O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London:

Jonathan Cape, 2000), 546.21 Jeffrey Meyers, “Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot: A Friendship”, The Virginia

Quarterly Review (Summer 1980), 455-469. Alternatively, seewww.vqronline.org/essay/wyndham-lewis-and-ts-eliot-friendship. [Accessed3 August 2017.]

22 It could be speculated that Eliot may have had a hand in the claim that

Lewis was “as famous” as Eliot in the article in The Natal Mercury on his rediscovery of the portrait.23 Eliot’s trips to South Africa occurred when apartheid was being legally and

rapidly entrenched. Seehttps://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/031v01538/04lv01828/051v01829/061v01857.htm. [Accessed 15 December 2017.]24T.S. Eliot, “Poetry and Propaganda”, The Bookman (February 1930), 598.25 Edward Said, Culture & Imperialism (1993; London: Vintage Books, 1994), xiv.26 I wish to express my gratitude and appreciation to Director of the Durban

Art Gallery, Dr Mduduzi Xakaza, and his team for assisting me so generouslyand considerately with my enquiries concerning the portrait.27 Ibid., xv.

*photographer, Peter Upfold (& by kind permission of the

Bessie Head Library)

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Covering years 1932-33, Volume 6 documents T. S. Eliot’s mostcrucial years, both in public and private. Like previous volumes,these letters show Eliot to be a highly-conscious, considered andvoluminous letter writer. There is a wealth of Criterion and Faberbusiness correspondence, in addition to marty letters to and fromprominent bishops and priests, which emphasize Eliot’scommitment to the Anglo-Catholic faith and concern aboutchallenges to religious orthodoxy. He confesses he is ‘a ratherfanatical Catholic’. But most significant and moving in thisvolume are the letters that detail and chart the excruciatinglypainful break-up of his marriage. In his own words, the lasteighteen years have been ‘like a bad Dostoevski novel’. It istestament to the late Valerie Eliot’s sourcing and gathering of herhusband’s letters, as well as her belief that Vivien’s point of viewbe expressed, that both parties’ thoughts and feelings relating tothis period are shown. The inclusion of Vivien’s own letters(more than fifty of them), alongside her husband’s, provide amore balanced, just and sensitive outlook on their separationthan previous accounts. The letters afford perspective and correctwholly negative criticisms of Eliot about his treatment of Vivien;most famously made by Michael Hastings in his 1984 play Tomand Viv, as well as by Carole Seymour-Jones, who wrote abiography of Vivien’s life. They reveal a fallible, merecompassionate, rounded and wounded man. In early 1932, themarriage is in disarray. Eliot is ‘broken’ and Vivien in a perpetu~a~‘state of collapse’. Ralph Hodgson, fellow contemporary p~eet and

95